Human Bottlenecks
AI models are very capable and get more capable each year. So naturally people<br>feel they’re underusing them. There’s a tweet that goes like: your laptop has a<br>100M USD startup in it, you just have to figure the right sequence of words to<br>get it out. And beyond money, people imagine AI could boost them in every area<br>of life. Thus all these perennial ideas: of an AI executive assistant, an AI<br>tutor, an AI that curates your “digital garden”, an AI that (sigh) writes<br>flashcards for you.
The general template is: if only I could wire up the right prompts and the right<br>tools in the right harness, I could have an agent that would boost my<br>productivity 10x, or fix my problems with therapy, or make me more social, or<br>more knowledgeable. This was, curiously, the ambition of a lot of early<br>computing pioneers: Augmenting Human Intellect, Man-Computer<br>Symbiosis. Engelbart’s lab was called the Augmentation Research<br>Center! And more recently, people used to complain about how everyone has<br>the Library of Alexandria in their pocket, and yet, we are not all genius<br>polymaths.
And these ideas are perennial because they never seem to happen. It’s like the<br>Solow paradox on an individual level. Why? I think there are two<br>reasons: first, most people lack what Andy Matuschak calls a “serious<br>context of use” (AI doesn’t move the needle because there’s no needle to<br>move); second, most people are bottlenecked by internal factors where AI (or<br>anything external, for that matter) can’t move the needle.
The Serious Context of Use
I have heard so many people, online and in real life, tell me some variation of:<br>“I want to [use|build] an app that uses AI to write flashcards”. How many of<br>those people do you think have ever written a flashcard? How many of them use<br>Anki every day? Have ever used Anki? The people who want an AI that<br>writes flashcards for them don’t use flashcards. They have no reason<br>to. Dually, the people who use flashcards would benefit little from AI<br>writing their flashcards.
Analogously with “AI tutors”. If you had the ghost of John von Neumann in your<br>laptop, what would you have him teach you? Let’s be honest. You’d go through<br>chapter one of some math topic you’re vaguely curious about and then forget<br>about it. And that would probably be the rational move! Most people are not<br>autodidacts because most people have no material reason to learn a specific<br>topic (i.e. their job does not require it) and the problem with learning for the<br>sake of learning is opportunity cost: there is no a priori reason to learn one<br>thing over another, so better to do nothing and wait for something to appear<br>which actually grabs your interest. Again, this is likely rational! Could you<br>imagine if you found everything interesting? You’d spend years living in a<br>basement curating a wiki of late Soviet military hardware or something. So, even<br>if you had John von Neumann in your pocket, it probably wouldn’t move the<br>needle.
Would an “AI executive assistant” actually boost your productivity? What would<br>it do, other than tell you to do the things you already know you have to do?<br>With these ideas that are so attractive in the abstract, the way you deflate<br>them is you interrogate the concrete, fine-grained details. Take a day at work,<br>and ask: what exact actions could an AI looking over my shoulder have taken,<br>that would have made a difference?
Finally there’s the tools-for-thought/notetaking people. God save us. It’s<br>always the same thing. Your folder with notes—pardon me, your “second<br>brain”—plus an AI agent that writes, edits, synthesizes information,<br>answers queries. You could build this in an afternoon, and it won’t move the<br>needle in your life, for the same reason that building the second brain in the<br>first place didn’t make a difference.
See, most of us, unless we are students, we really don’t have cause to take<br>notes on anything. If you’re a student, you take notes from the textbook. I keep<br>a journal, which is occasionally useful. At some jobs I’ve kept a work journal,<br>this has also been useful. If I stopped, probably, not much would change.
The notetaking people—and I say this with all the love in the world—are<br>never, like, a researcher at the cutting edge of their field, building this vast<br>cathedral of knowledge, note-by-note, so they can derive new insights. Never a<br>historian who has to read tens of millions of words across thousands of sources<br>to synthesize the life of some historical person. It’s never someone doing<br>something hard. It’s always some blogger. Their “digital garden” is about how to<br>keep a digital garden. It’s very solipsistic: there’s no output, no<br>deliverables. The deliverable is you take a screenshot of your Obsidian<br>graph and tweet about it to show off how much it looks like an incomprehensible<br>ball of twine.
So, what difference is the AI going to make? “It’s going to write my<br>notes”. About what? “It’s going to read articles for me and summarize them and<br>add them to the digital garden”. For what...